Last Hug
by Song of the Lark
Summary: They were God's form of compensation, these two boys who had peered up at her from behind their parents' legs once upon a time, with their little hands clutching and pulling at their mother's skirt and their father's trousers. Tadashi and Hiro.


_Theirs was a quick one_, they'd told her. _Painless._

They repeated these words dozens, maybe hundreds of times, until they didn't and all that was left for her were words that rang hollow in her ears in the week to follow.

_Painless_.

Cass chuckles to herself. She had latched onto their words, breathed them in, lived by them and parroted them back with a half-smile on her face because she _wanted_ to believe them. She wanted to believe these well-wishers, these fellow mourners who would breathe comforting lies into one ear and platitudes in the other. She wanted to think that the two people she loved most hadn't suffered in their last moments.

But there isn't any way she can lie to herself now–not when their cold, dead bodies are bare, offered up for the world to see.

She steps across the length of their bodies with slow, measured steps; one hand runs along the edge of the open coffin.

They did a good job, the funeral home. The major wounds on their chests and stomachs are hidden away behind clothes. Her brother is dressed in his best formal suit, the one he had complained constricted his neck but always gave him a sense of self-import. On the other hand, her sister-in-law is wearing her favorite dress, which is soft pink. It flares out at the bottom and darkens into a purplish-black, like the sunset.

She doesn't have to see the shredded skin and gaping holes now.

Cass collapses at the foot of their shared coffin, hands lying primly in her lap and legs tucked beneath her bum, and just rests the side of her head against its dark wood, gazing at those two stiff faces.

They must have felt _something_, she muses. The moment the shrapnel pierced their eyes, tore through their throats and ripped into their lungs, drowning them in blood–they have must have felt that.

Her lips skew and she laughs; it sounds strangled in her throat, like a dying animal's.

She didn't even have time to _grieve!_ The minute she heard about the accident, she flung her apron on the counter and burst out the cafe's door, feet pounding against pavement and hair whipping into her eyes, with only a single thought in her mind:

_No_.

Not them.

_Never_ them.

These things happen to _other_ people. You hear about them in the news and feel your heart reach out to them for that split second, but you'd inevitably move on, forget about them, push them to the back of your head because _they weren't you_.

And now, all she has on her hands is fleeting pity and–

_Creeeeeaaaak._

Her breath catches. Cass raises her head, eyes honing in on two small figures; one hides behind the thick wooden panel with only their eyes and a few tufts of hair sticking past the opening and the other clutches at the former's pants.

–and _them_.

"Tadashi. Hiro." The words are stiff in her mouth. It's been years since she's last said them; they're almost like a foreign language to her, those names, a language that she had learned when she was younger but had decayed after an extended period of disuse.

She never had the time to visit. She was busy running her cafe, and her siblings were holed up in their research and hospital work. It didn't help that they lived on the other side of the country. The three of them, they always had excuses on their lips, promises of _next Christmas _or _maybe during New Years. _Life just got in the way.

And now, these two boys, boys who've never even had a proper conversation with her, are her responsibility. Just how cruel God could be?

Cass swallows down the large lump in her throat and forces out a smile. Hiro and Tadashi, both being practically strangers to her, could never hope to notice anything wrong with her. She holds out her hand.

"Let's go home."

* * *

A/N: Wow, it's been so long since I posted up anything. I had this sitting around in my computer for a few years now but never finished. It's still a work in progress, but I'll just post up the beginning and hopefully finish it soon. The story probably will have 3-4 short chapters and they'll be short moments in Cass' life both before and after Tadashi's death.


End file.
